Archive for the ‘MySQL’ Category

fadvise syscall, myisam data file caching, and a lesson learned in debugging

fadvise is a system call that can be used to give Linux hints about how it should be caching files. It has a few options for caching, not caching, read ahead, and random access. I was looking into used fadvise because a client ran into an issue where some infrequently used myisam data files were [...]

June 11, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • No Comments

Why Oracle can’t kill MySQL.

When Oracle agreed to acquire Sun there was some speculation that Oracle might try to kill MySQL. First this wouldn’t be a very prudent effort on Oracle’s part and second it’s not even possible. I think Monty has the best explanation from his comment on his blog:
The simple fact is one can’t own an [...]

May 19, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • One Comment

Update of Google’s Sysbench patch to 0.4.12

[Update: I found the magic javascript links that show old releases of sysbench.]
Sysbench is an application that can be used to benchmark different system parameters and also includes support for testing MySQL directly. Google has released a patch for sysbench that adds a lot of new OLTP tests. It’s great for testing MySQL and for [...]

May 18, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • No Comments

Percona Performance Conference EMT Presentation Slides

I sat down about 20 minutes ago to write a blog post that included a link to the slides of my EMT presentation. It turned into a long post about the presentation, how I feel EMT was received and my feelings on presentations in general. Here is the short post and the link to the [...]

April 22, 2009 • Posted in: EMT, Geek, MySQL • No Comments

MySQL Brings the Heat

This week throngs of MySQL developers, users, and enthusiasts descended on silicon valley. Apparently the valley’s cooling system can’t keep up because as they arrived the outside temperature went up into the 90s (32s for those of you who choose to use a sane temperature measurement system). I’m not attending the conference this year but [...]

April 20, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 3 Comments

Longest beta ever, myisamchk –parallel-recover

I was reading through the manual and noticed that myisamchk parallel recover option is still listed as beta code. The feature was added in 4.0.2 which was released in july 2002. This means it’s been in beta longer than gmail

April 11, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 2 Comments

Where did 5.0.79 enterprise come from?

While updating the mirror last week I was surprised to see that the newest MRU MySQL release is numbered 5.0.79. Previously enterprise releases had even numbers and community releases had odd numbers. I posted the question in #mysql-dev and HarrisonF was kind enough to explain it all.
MySQL 5.0 is running out of version numbers. There [...]

April 10, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 8 Comments

Google Summer of Code and #mysql-dev, who is supposed to answer the questions?

The #mysql-dev irc channel on freenode was created with the idea of getting the community people more involved in active discussion about mysql internals and development. When the channel was first created this happened for a few weeks and I was pretty happy to be able to observe and participate in the discussion. Now it’s [...]

March 30, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 7 Comments

Select distinct fail

A few months ago I got a strange email from one of my clients that contained two very simple looking select queries. The only difference between the two queries is that one included the distinct keyword and the other didn’t. The strange part is that the query that used distinct returned zero rows. I spent [...]

February 21, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • No Comments

On MySQL 5.1 going GA

When MySQL 5.1 first went GA I had the same knee jerk reaction as most of the community, “It’s not ready! There are still bugs!”. After thinking about it for a week or so I don’t think this matters. It’s true that MySQL isn’t really ready for GA but it doesn’t matter since most MySQL [...]

December 17, 2008 • Posted in: MySQL • 3 Comments